Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  “A sleazebag,” Bright mutters, avoiding Hudson’s glare.

  I make a submissive face. “Shall I tell him you want to make a treaty?”

  Bright is not at all sure if I’m being sarcastic or simply inept in my use of English. He oscillates between rage and contempt with a bias toward contempt. Hudson covers his reaction with a cough. “Yeah, tell him we want to talk. I’m sure we can work something out. It would help a lot if we were able to speak to the last person to see Mitch Turner alive. That would impress us considerably.”

  They both finish their water in a few gulps, then stand up to leave. I follow them through the club to the front door, keeping my eyes on Bright. Yep, there it goes, that scan of the room he told himself he wasn’t going to make. Nat, of course, is nowhere to be seen.

  As soon as they’re safely into a taxi, I call Vikorn. He’s silent for a full minute, then: “What’s your instinct?”

  “We’re the Indians, they’re the cowboys, they want to make a treaty. They want Chanya at the meeting, Colonel.”

  He coughs. “Tell them to come to the bar tomorrow night. We’ll close it for as long as the meeting takes.”

  “Will Chanya be there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the dead of night my mobile rings. It is Lek at last. A desperate tone (he sounds as if he’s dying): “You have to help me.”

  Lumpini Park (named for the Buddha’s birthplace) at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over sixty percent. In the darkness: furtive movements on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion (highly addictive, they say) of sex and death. It is past midnight in this tropical garden. At the edge of the park, I have to call Lek on his mobile to find out his exact location. He is standing alone by the artificial lake, staring at a reflection of the moon in the water. When I touch him, his body seems half frozen.

  “She told me to come here,” he whispers after a while. “She insisted that I see it at its worst.”

  “She’s right. That’s exactly what a good Elder Sister is supposed to do.”

  “I feel dreadful. She totally destroyed me.”

  “She’s just testing you. Better you see the worst before you take the big step. You have to be sure you won’t end up here.”

  “Half of the whores here are katoeys,” he blurts. “They’ve lost everything, even basic humanity. They’re just . . . just creatures. I’ve seen them hanging out on the benches, waiting for customers, just like starving demons. Some of them have lesions. They service taxi drivers.”

  “What did Fatima say, exactly?”

  “She said she would help me if I would drink the full cup of bitterness. She said the path of a katoey is sacred, only katoeys and Buddhas really see the world for what it is. She said I had to be strong as steel, soft as air.”

  When I put my arm around him, he bursts into sobs. “I don’t think I have the strength. I only wanted to dance.”

  “You think dancing is easy?”

  Looking up at me with those big eyes of his: “Thanks for coming. I had a moment of weakness. I better stay here for a while. I need to see it all, don’t I?”

  “Yes.” There’s really nothing more to say.

  29

  The Old Man’s Club would not, under normal circumstances, be anyone’s choice of venue for such grim negotiations, but it is the best we can do. The CIA, who are not officially here at all, do not possess an office, nobody wants to do it in a hotel room, and the District 8 police station is hardly appropriate. The only reason I am present is because Vikorn needs an interpreter whose discretion can be relied upon. The only reason Chanya is present is to take the opportunity to prove she didn’t do it. (She spent the whole of yesterday locked up with Vikorn in his office.) The only reason my mother is here is that it is her club and no way is she going to miss out.

  Although both Hudson and Bright have read it many times before, they take a minute to study Chanya’s confession, the one that Vikorn dictated and I wrote, which they have in English translation as well as the original Thai. They both look up at the same time, and it is the young and ferociously eager Bright who speaks first. I am surprised he begins by addressing me not as the official interpreter but in my capacity as humble scribe.

  “You were present when this statement was taken, Detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are the one who wrote it down?”

  “Yes.”

  “While Colonel Vikorn was present?”

  “Yes.”

  “And these are the true words of Ms. Chanya Phongchit as spoken at that time?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Did you think anything odd about her story?”

  “No. You have to remember—”

  A peremptory wave of the hand. “I know, I know, this is Bangkok, and these kinds of things happen all the time. Let me cut to the chase, Detective.” He leans forward, thighs pried open by the pressure of magnificent balls (obviously). “Detective, have you ever had sexual intercourse?”

  A baffled pause. “It has been my good fortune from time to time.”

  “And have you ever had the good fortune to do it from behind? Never mind what part of the lady’s anatomy is most interesting, let’s just concentrate on the position.”

  Chanya inexplicably covering a grin, my mother frowning and staring at me, then from me to the Colonel. I think she has seen the drift quicker than anyone. The Colonel has not understood a word.

  “Yes. It’s not my preferred—”

  Another peremptory wave. “Spare us the comment, Detective. Let me ask you this. When you exploited your good fortune in this way, did you notice that the front of your thighs were really rather close to the backs of the lady’s? Putting it bluntly, Detective, unless you have a two-foot dick, your body would have been pressing against hers most of the time for the purpose of maintaining penetration?”

  My heart sinks, and my mother looks away in disgust, I think, that the Colonel and I (her son of all people) should have committed such a gaffe. Only Chanya is unperturbed. On Vikorn’s order I translate the interrogation so far. To my astonishment, he also is unperturbed and responds with an avuncular smile. I should add that since the arrival of the CIA he has scrupulously and impeccably maintained the part of every farang’s idea of a crumpled, corrupt, incompetent, and less-than-intelligent third-world cop who only dimly grasps what is being said and who lost the plot some time ago. A slight shaking has been introduced in his left hand—a subtle addition, artistically done—and he has a half-empty bottle of Mekong whiskey on a table next to his chair. He has not shaved this morning; gray stubble catches the light nicely. A few deft touches, in other words, and the master has transformed himself—an astonishing achievement when you consider that in actual fact he is a decadent sleazebag third-world cop, but of an entirely different order. Any fool can play his opposite, but to play the character who is only a couple of shades away from the person you really are—now that shows real talent, in my humble opinion. Bright has been ignoring him with exaggerated contempt. This is exactly what he expected from us. Hudson so far is carefully noncommittal in his body language. Bright grinds relentlessly on, his voice rising through the full gamut of triumphalism to find its level in an excited squeak.

  “Any woman who decided to castrate you from such a position, even if she had the muscles of an Olympic weight lifter, would have to cut off one of your thighs first, wouldn’t she?” Just in case he is not being explicit enough for my poor understanding, he stands up, folds Chanya’s statement I suppose as representing the knife, bends forward, and swings backward with his hand a couple of times. “It’s the one position where a man need fear no attack at all,” he adds with a triumphant smile, “not even if the lady had access to a samurai sword,” and sits down.

  I translate for Vikorn, who has been watching the performance with a twinkle in his eye and who, to everyone’s astonishm
ent except Chanya’s, bursts out laughing and clumsily claps a few times. Bright is seriously taken aback.

  “Please tell our American colleagues how smart I think they are,” Vikorn instructs, his left hand shaking as he reaches for the whiskey bottle. When I have done so, I see that Hudson has finally decided to take an interest in Vikorn and stares at him for the next few minutes. “They saw this obvious flaw immediately, on the first reading I am sure.” A sip from his shaking glass. “What were we thinking that we produced such an amateurish statement? How could anyone hope to fool the CIA?”

  I translate. Bright is lost now and checks with Hudson, who does not take his eyes off Vikorn.

  “But what were we to do, gentlemen?” Vikorn raises his hands helplessly, an impotent old man caught in something way too big for him. “Chanya, my dear, please tell them exactly what happened.”

  Chanya looks at me demurely. “Should I speak in English or Thai? My English isn’t really that good.”

  I’ve had no warning about this development and do not know how I’m supposed to reply. “Your English is fine,” I say testily. She gives me one of her smiles. I disgust myself by melting and smiling back. She speaks in Thai, I translate.

  “I always wanted to tell the truth about what happened to Mitch, but I was firmly instructed that for reasons of security I should keep my mouth shut.”

  “That’s quite correct,” Vikorn corroborates.

  “As soon as we left this bar that night, Mitch became certain we were being followed.”

  “Oh no,” from Bright when I translate, who buries his head in his hands and shakes it from side to side. “Wouldn’t have been two men with long black beards, would it?”

  “Shut up,” Hudson tells him, and nods for Chanya to go on.

  “I didn’t see their beards until later—only Mitch saw them at that point. He said he’d been followed before, down in Songai Kolok, that he was sure his cover was blown and that maybe there was some kind of fatwa on his head.”

  “I just can’t believe they’re even trying—”

  “Will you shut it?” from Hudson. An I’ll get even glare from Bright.

  “We thought about running away, but Mitch said that wouldn’t do any good. The worst would be for them to catch up out in the street. He was sure they wouldn’t have guns. He thought that in his hotel room he would be able to handle them.” Bright is staring incredulously, making a great drama of holding his head, rocking from side to side.

  Hudson interrupts, looking at Chanya. “Okay, I get the picture. You went back to his hotel, they burst in with at least one knife, slice him up, and cut his cock off. You’re embroiled in the battle, but no one wants to hurt you, so you end up covered in blood but unharmed. Let’s say all that is a given. Why in hell would you have concocted that statement?”

  I translate for Vikorn, who takes up the story. “Think about it, gentlemen. What has your government been saying about the security risk here in Thailand from Islamic fanatics? And what has that done to our tourist trade already? How much worse could it get if there’s a report of a genuine terrorist atrocity, right here in Bangkok? This was not something I’m qualified to deal with myself. I had to go to the highest levels of government, to the chief of our homeland defense.”

  Hudson sighs. “So you’re saying you were told to cover up?”

  “Yes. What else were they going to say? The entire story depended on the evidence of a whore.”

  A pause. “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Well, there’s the knife. The murder weapon.”

  Now Bright’s jaw has dropped, but Hudson’s thin lips have opened just a tad. “Right. We were going to ask you about that. You have it here to show us?”

  “It’s in the fridge,” says Chanya, and stands up to bring it. It is carefully preserved in a plastic bag, which Hudson holds up to the light. He seems to be wrestling with a smile as he hands it to Bright, who also holds it up to the light. He shakes his head and hands it back. “I still don’t buy it. So they found some frizzy black hairs to stick on it. What does that prove?”

  “Anything else?” Hudson asks Chanya.

  “Well, Mitch fought very bravely, and at one point he managed to get the knife off them.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes, and when one of them tried to grab it, he sliced off two fingers before they overwhelmed him again.”

  Hudson’s gaze is steady now, and the smile has gone from his mouth, but there is a subtle difference in the way he is looking at her. “Kept the fingers, did you? In the fridge, by any chance?”

  Chanya walks to the fridge and comes back with another plastic bag and hands it to him. Bright is trying to follow Hudson’s lead, but Hudson isn’t giving anything away at all. He examines the frozen fingers in the bag, then hands them to Bright. “And when we send the knife and fingers away to the lab, the lab will confirm that these fingers produced some of the prints on the knife, right?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “So they found some fingers and some hairs from a black beard—you’re not gonna—”

  All Hudson needs to do is stare at him this time. Things have taken an unexpected turn, after all, and Bright is no longer so sure of his cynicism. He closes his mouth and leans back on his chair, thighs splayed: Okay, wise guy, it’s your show and your funeral if you screw up.

  Hudson stands and beckons to me to join him at the bar. In a whisper: “Please ask your Colonel to join us.” I beckon to the Colonel, who is in the process of pouring himself another drink. Vikorn joins us, bending forward and holding his lower back. Hudson says: “Just ask him one question, please. If he were to place a bet on these hairs and fingers turning out to have DNA that the CIA database will confirm is that of a known Islamic terrorist, perhaps one who died recently—if I were to open a book on it, how much would he place?”

  “Three million dollars, even money,” Vikorn says brightly, forgetting his backache. “Want to?”

  “No,” Hudson says slowly, “we don’t have that kind of cash to play with. Certainly not on a stone cold loser.” He gives me a nod, surprisingly friendly.

  “What will you do about your colleague?” I ask in my most polite tone. He doesn’t answer except with a subtle alteration in his facial muscles. I’m not an expert on encryption, but I think that look might translate as: Bright doesn’t want to spend the rest of his career in the field either. I say sotto voce: “Would a video help?”

  A true pro, he takes in my meaning with lightning speed and shakes his head. “Keep it as backup.”

  “He’s a jaw-grinder on the home stretch,” I report, still deeply in awe of my mother’s detailed knowledge of the male rampant.

  A quick grin builds around Hudson’s mouth and is as quickly wiped off by professional discipline. “She could tell that just by looking at him, couldn’t she?”

  I have a feeling Hudson will be back.

  “Well,” says Hudson in a louder voice, indicating to Bright to stand up, “obviously, this evidence isn’t something we can afford to ignore. At the same time, our government is sensitive to any economic damage Thailand might suffer if this sort of thing hits the news.” A look at Bright. “Frankly, this is going to take a while to sort out. There will be top-level meetings, Homeland Security will be involved, it’ll go to the Joint Chiefs, probably the president. Any officers associated with it will attract attention.” A smile. “Hopefully of a positive kind.”

  Bright nods thoughtfully. Perhaps he deserves his name, for his change of posture is instant and very convincing. He shakes Chanya’s hand, calls her and my mother ma’am, and generally demonstrates courtesy all around, even gratitude as he makes for the door.

  When they have gone, I confront Vikorn. “You’ve put the blame on Muslims. You could start a war.”

  He shakes his head. “Grow up, Sonchai. I took your delicate little heart into account and fingered the Indonesians. None of your new friends in Songai Kolok is implicated. You should be pleased.”r />
  When I call Mustafa, I make the same point. “But he blamed Muslims,” he says, and hangs up.

  30

  In case you didn’t get it, farang, that was the end of the Main Plot. (You remember, the Cover-up—but don’t worry, I feel a Coda coming on.) Vikorn did not, of course, expect to be believed with his cock-and-bull story, but as we all know, that is not the way the intelligence industry operates. Belief is for choirboys. What you need (apparently) is a fantastically complicated and enticing distraction that will make it quite impossible for anyone to draw a conclusion one way or the other but at the same time will offer itself as a vehicle for promotion. (I don’t need to tell you this, farang. I think you invented this game, no?) I guess Chanya is safe for a couple of decades while they mull it over. Doesn’t Vikorn just take your breath away sometimes?

  As a consequence, things are a little slow here, but just at the moment I’m rather fascinated by the homely family atmosphere that has been developing at the club this past week, thanks to Hudson and Bright.

  Bright first. Nat reports to my mother, who reports to me, that he’s quite a good boy really. Nat’s challenge to his virility punched a nice big hole through his ego, and with the ensuing flood of light we now have a brand-new picture of dear Steve, who fell apart immediately after coitus on the third date and confessed that he’s not the great tough larger-than-life patriot he appears to be (You’re not? exclaimed Nat with an expression of shock; No, he admitted in a tone that recognized that some people would find that hard to believe); au contraire, as Truffaut used to say, the poor young fellow is all bent out of shape from a particularly ugly divorce in which she made the usual baseless allegations of abuse in order to get the house, the car, and the bank account and full custody of his toddler daughter, with only supervised access for him.

  We watched while he went through a schizophrenic period when he was not at all sure whether he should keep up appearances or not (or whom he should keep them up for; I myself was treated to a testosteronic strut and a sad droopy shamble in the space of an hour), but I’m happy to report that thanks to Thai therapy, he did not take more than a week to return to the human family and now he arrives every night on the dot at eight, pays Nat’s bar fine, and takes her upstairs, where she rewards him with an orgasm including all bells and whistles. (We can hear her in the bar if we turn the system down. Bright knows this, of course, because Hudson told him, but cured of hubris by my country and my women, the dear lad reappears after his heroic coupling with no more than a grateful beam on his square Nordic features.) Nat asked me to ask Vikorn how much American spies get paid these days.